SilentStrider:doglover: Because anyone cares about someone who wasn't cooked up by Stan Lee.

Some guy you may have heard of not created by Stan Lee.

/bub

Besides, were it not for Stan Lee, the X Men woulda died a slow obscure death like Black Panther.

Instead, they because the mainest of mainstream Marvel characters. He didn't create them, but he did save them. That and you've got the Avengers now and fark but they're all his babies.

I'm still waiting for the Squirrel Girl and Deadpool movie series. Hell Deadpool is a great character all by himself in ANY movie and they have Ryan Renolds and a big war chest with their recent success. Let's see the Merc with the Mouth take on Iron Man (aka Robert Downey Jr) in a film. It would be awesome.

untaken_name:moothemagiccow: untaken_name: moothemagiccow: I don't understand the need to placate such a tiny minority of the population.

You mean people who still buy comic books, right?

Gay people who still buy comic books

Wait, there are straight people who want to look at pictures of heavily-muscled dudes flexing in lycra jumpsuits?

And that's one of the major problems with the comics industry... when people think comics, they think superheroes. In a healthy comics industry, superheroes would be a niche, not the bread and butter.

But, better to keep the few hardcore fans you have left, and keep throwing out lame gimmicks to get as many of that small number as possible to buy rather than try to expand beyond that pitifully small fanbase.

robohobo:The X-men suck, and have almost always sucked. They're the comic book equivalent of a gang, and an exceptionally whiny gang at that.

/dirty mutants//seriously "No More Mutants!"

Chronicle

did a really good job at completely shooting down the "awkward teenager/outcast gets superpowers" angle. The once bullied quickly becomes the bully. In all the farking issues of X-Men....not one mutant teenager decided to vaporize their high school? Seriously?

The whining, melodrama and bloated roster make the series become quickly intolerable for me personally. Most of the movies I did actually like (You cannot go wrong with casting Sir Patrick Stewart as Professor X) surprisingly.

Oh, if you really despise the X-Men.....Garth Ennis does a wonderful job brutally murdering a not so-subtle parody in The Boys.

Do the gay reveals or whatever actually even move comics anymore? I mean, I understand how it works in theory: make a character dramatically reveal that he's a member of some subculture, splash it on the front page, local news realizes it can use it as an excuse to do a fluff piece on said subculture (the primary way local news fills otherwise dead airtime), national news notices local news doing it, bam, free advertising. But it seems like they're about 5 or 10 years late for gay folk to be considered a separate subculture rather than a fairly seamless subsection of regular culture.

So, basically... is this actually going to accomplish anything?

PiffMan420:Chronicle did a really good job at completely shooting down the "awkward teenager/outcast gets superpowers" angle. The once bullied quickly becomes the bully. In all the farking issues of X-Men....not one mutant teenager decided to vaporize their high school? Seriously?

To be fair, I think the general plotline of X-Men is that Professor X finds new mutants and mind-rapes them into the herd, so it's not like they have the free will to do anything un-heroic, especially since he keeps them in their pre-adolescent mentality so they can't grow up and fight back against him.

Plus the kid in Chronicle that went bad wasn't an "outcast" so much as an outright victim of constant physical abuse. Most teenagers would use superpowers like the two dumbshiat kids in the movie, not Evil McEvilpants.

Jim_Callahan:Do the gay reveals or whatever actually even move comics anymore? I mean, I understand how it works in theory: make a character dramatically reveal that he's a member of some subculture, splash it on the front page, local news realizes it can use it as an excuse to do a fluff piece on said subculture (the primary way local news fills otherwise dead airtime), national news notices local news doing it, bam, free advertising. But it seems like they're about 5 or 10 years late for gay folk to be considered a separate subculture rather than a fairly seamless subsection of regular culture.

So, basically... is this actually going to accomplish anything?.

No,.

At the most, it will be a sales spike of a few months for whatever character they retcon into being gay. If it's a new book that isn't about Superman, Batman, or Green Lantern, it'll start out with fair-to-middlin' sales, and be moving less than 30,000 copies within six months to a year, canceled or rebooted again within 18 months to two years.

Basically, all stunts like this do is bring in a large amount of outsiders for one month, who promptly never buy another comic book again, and pisses off quite a few of the remaining die-hard fans that the big two shuffle around like deck chairs on the Titanic because it's just too hard to figure out how to expand their audience past the 250,000 fanboys they currently have.

Stunts like these generally do not bring in new readers. The sales do not stay at a decent level, and the books always fall back to their old sales levels, if not lower sales levels.

Terrible Old Man:I'm all for promoting gay rights, but I'll be honest, everytime I see gay characters in comics of any sort it seems to be a cheap ploy of sensationalism or titulation rather than a statement.

So... don't read a lot of comics, then? Because that's why literally every single element of teen comics (superhero comics especially) goes into them, from the gravity-defying female costumes to the very special episodes about drug abuse to the repeated killing and resurrecting of every character ever. Comics in general can be argued to have significant artistic merit, but superhero comics are figuratively and sometimes literally pulp lit, not meaningful literature. Sensationalism and titillation are the name of the game, you're more likely to get meaningful statements from the National Enquirer interviewing the Bat Boy.

Terrible Old Man:I'm all for promoting gay rights, but I'll be honest, everytime I see gay characters in comics of any sort it seems to be a cheap ploy of sensationalism or titulation rather than a statement.

I would recommend Batwoman: Elegy for you. She's gay, but they actually make it fit into the character rather well.

I love how DC is always at least ten years behind Marvel on innovations.

Marvel puts out their Ultimates line, and a decade later, DC pulls their "52" stuff, for example.

Reminds me about an anecdote Stan Lee once told about how the "Marvel Bullpen" used to drive the staff at DC totally batsh*t in the 60's. DC would think that Marvel's increased sales were due to their covers having dialogue, so DC would do the same, only to find out that Marvel found out about the tactic so they would then do covers without the dialogue and yet still have higher sales numbers.

TV's Vinnie:I love how DC is always at least ten years behind Marvel on innovations.

Marvel puts out their Ultimates line, and a decade later, DC pulls their "52" stuff, for example.

Reminds me about an anecdote Stan Lee once told about how the "Marvel Bullpen" used to drive the staff at DC totally batsh*t in the 60's. DC would think that Marvel's increased sales were due to their covers having dialogue, so DC would do the same, only to find out that Marvel found out about the tactic so they would then do covers without the dialogue and yet still have higher sales numbers.

It's like DC was the Jay Leno of comics publishing.

Actually, DC's attempt to crib off the Ultimates line was the All Star books, of which only two were made.

Jim_Callahan:To be fair, I think the general plotline of X-Men is that Professor X finds new mutants and mind-rapes them into the herd, so it's not like they have the free will to do anything un-heroic, especially since he keeps them in their pre-adolescent mentality so they can't grow up and fight back against him.